Philo of Byblos

PHILO OF BYBLOS' PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION

These things being so, Sanchuniathon, who was a man of much learning and great curiosity, and desirous of knowing the earliest history of all nations from the creation of the world, searched out with great care the history of Taautus, knowing that of all men under the sun Taautus was the first who thought of the invention of letters, and began the writing of records: and he laid the foundation, as it were, of his history, by beginning with him, whom the Egyptians called Thoyth, and the Alexandrians Thoth, translated by the Greeks into Hermes.

Editor's Note — Gad Yaton: The Egyptians claim Thoth as their own god, an ibis-headed scribe of the underworld. But the Phœnician Taautus is a man—a mortal benefactor who invented letters and was later deified. This is the difference between the Egyptian method and the Phœnician: the Egyptians begin with the god and retroject him into the age of origins; the Phœnicians begin with the man, whose deeds survive in memory and who is only later called a god. The archaeological evidence supports the Phœnician priority in alphabetic writing. The earliest known alphabetic inscriptions—the Proto-Sinaitic texts from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai—were produced by Canaanite miners working under Egyptian supervision between 1850 and 1550 before the common era. The Egyptians, with all their hieroglyphs, never produced an alphabet of their own. Their writing remained the property of priests; the Phœnician invention belonged to merchants and to the world.

But the most recent of the writers on religion rejected the real events from the beginning, and having invented allegories and myths, and formed a fictitious affinity to the cosmical phenomena, established mysteries, and overlaid them with a cloud of absurdity, so that one cannot easily discern what really occurred: but he having lighted upon the collections of secret writings of the Ammoneans which were discovered in the shrines and of course were not known to all men, applied himself diligently to the study of them all; and when he had completed the investigation, he put aside the original myth and the allegories, and so completed his proposed work; until the priests who followed in later times wished to hide this away again, and to restore the mythical character; from which time mysticism began to rise up, not having previously reached the Greeks.

Editor's Note — Gad Yaton: Philo here describes the very process by which all ancient history was corrupted. The true events—the lives and deeds of mortal benefactors—were recorded by the first scribes. Later priests, seeking power over the ignorant, transformed those records into allegories of cosmic phenomena and wrapped them in mystery. The Greeks, receiving these corrupted traditions, misunderstood them entirely and turned them into their impossible theogonies—the castration of Ouranos, the swallowing of children, the battles in heaven. Sanchuniathon's method was to strip away the allegories and recover the real events beneath. This is the method I follow in this book.

But with a view to clearness hereafter, and the determination of particulars, it is necessary to state distinctly beforehand that the most ancient of the barbarians, and especially the Phœnicians and Egyptians, from whom the rest of mankind received their traditions, regarded as the greatest gods those who had discovered the necessaries of life, or in some way done good to the nations. Esteeming these as benefactors and authors of many blessings, they worshipped them also as gods after their death, and built shrines, and consecrated pillars and staves after their names: these the Phœnicians held in great reverence, and assigned to them their greatest festivals. Especially they applied the names of their kings to the elements of the cosmos, and to some of those who were regarded as gods. But they knew no other gods than those of nature, sun, and moon, and the rest of the wandering stars, and the elements and things connected with them, so that some of their gods were mortal and some immortal.

Editor's Note — Gad Yaton: This is the key to the whole history. The Phœnicians did not imagine gods in the manner of the Greeks—luminous beings who lived on Olympus and interfered in human affairs for their own amusement. They deified their own ancestors. Cronus was a king. Taautus was a scribe. Dagon was a farmer who discovered grain. The sun, moon, and stars were not persons but bodies of fire—divine only in the sense that they were powerful and beyond human control. When the Greeks and Hebrews later condemned the Phœnicians for idolatry, they were condemning ancestor worship, a practice that both Greeks and Hebrews themselves shared in their earliest periods, before their own priests and poets invented more sophisticated theologies to obscure the common origin.

BOOK I

The Cosmology and the Generations of the Gods,

Who Were Mortal Benefactors of the Race

Being the genuine fragment of Sanchuniathon, preserved by Eusebius and translated by Philo of Byblos, here presented with the later allegorical encrustations stripped away and with the confirmations of archaeology and the corrections of foreign traditions supplied by the narrator, Gad Yaton.